Many Disappointed by Wikia Search Debut

The long-awaited and much-hyped Wikia Search, a project of Jimmy Wales' Wikia empire, launched on Monday to a chorus of jeers from Web 2.0 advocates and search experts.

Wales, the cofounder of Wikipedia, had expressed optimism for a community-built search engine that could beat Google by allowing people to provide context, content, and ratings that no computer algorithm could match.

"Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet," Wales wrote on the Wikia Web site. "And we are making it open source. Wikia Search will start to change search from being proprietary, top-down, and closed."

The results delivered Monday didn't quite live up to expectations. A Wikia search for "George Bush" yielded as the top result "George Bush is a Crackwhore!" and several Bush joke sites. The top hits on Google, by contrast, were two Wikipedia articles and the official White House site.

Off-Base Results

When Business Week did a test search for "Abraham Lincoln," three of the top four results were for schools named after the president, while on Google the top result was ... a Wikipedia page.

On the TechCrunch blog, Michael Arrington called the alpha launch of Wikia Search "one of the biggest disappointments I've had the displeasure of reviewing." He said Wikia was "barely a search engine at all," and added that "the search results are poor and thin" and "absolutely no one is going to use this to search the Web, until (and if) it is greatly improved."

Arrington said that Wikia boasts hardly any of the much-touted human aspects. The only personal aspects to the service is a profile, to which users can add keywords, and user-written mini-articles, which are displayed at the top of relevant results pages. While each result has stars for user ratings, a la Amazon and Netflix, those stars "don't actually do anything yet," according to a pop-up message.

Good Idea, Poorly Implemented

Wikia Search's poorly executed rollout doesn't mean the concept of human-aided search isn't legitimate, Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research, said in a telephone interview.

"There are a lot of companies looking at this," Sterling said. It's an approach to the basic problem of search: getting the right results to the right people. And the holy grail of search is delivering an actual answer to a query, not just high-quality pointers to sources.

The biggest problem with Wikia Search might be the way Wikia promoted it before launch. "They created a lot of expectations directly and indirectly and what appeared yesterday was very disappointing," Sterling said. Wales' "very vocal criticism of search and Google's black-box approach built up those expectations," he added. While eight to 10 companies are working on similar ideas, Sterling said, "this is not any kind of a threat to Google in any way."

Arrington had stronger words for Wales. "It's time for Wales to be quiet, let this thing evolve or not, and eventually let the software do the talking," he wrote.

Wales did do some talking on TechCrunch, emphasizing that Wikia Search is a "project to build a search engine, not a search engine. We've been telling everyone that constantly. I'm sorry Michael's disappointed, but having said that, we didn't build it for him, but for people who think that openness, transparency, and participation are more important than slick releases."

Source: news.yahoo.com